It would have cost billions to do a gene study in just one disease.
Barer says Celgene is open to applying for approval one disease at a time.
The drug industry historically has developed new treatments by targeting one disease or one protein at a time.
One disease under study is cystic fibrosis, which is caused by one of around 200 defects on a single gene.
Every person is just one disease or accident away from needing Social Security disability to avoid homelessness and even death.
Diabetes is one disease that can cause major changes in the eye.
The first possible effect is the replacement of one disease by another.
"It could well be that what works for one disease will turn out to work for another, even though that wasn't the original intent, " he said.
Instead of narrowly studying only one disease, each team had the latitude, within a broad category, to focus on any drug targets or diseases they wanted to.
The databases can--in a single day--test one disease-causing protein against a trillion chemical compounds and rank which ones are most likely to latch onto the protein and gum up its works.
The transferability of his gene therapies from treating cancer to treating EB is an object lesson in itself, as a breakthrough in one disease often leads to new treatments in another.
The World Health Organization recently announced that the number one disease afflicting Western civilization is depression, and depression is often described as a state of high anxiety devoid of meaning and purpose.
There have been no clinical trials to assess the effect of higher doses, although two other studies done on less-sick patients might suggest the higher doses are problematic--one in 1998 for patients with cardiac disease and one last year for chronic kidney disease patients.
Of the 1, 284 diseases mapped, nearly 900 had genetic links to at least one other disease.
Eighty percent of those 65 and older suffer from at least one chronic disease and half suffer from two or more.
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Even if they are effective, vaccines may face stiff resistance from parents who are urged to let their 11-year-old daughter get a shot against a sexually transmitted disease or told that their son needs one for a disease that is likely never to harm him.
But no one knows which disease will be next, what animal will be its natural host, where it will happen, or how dangerous it will be.
Michael Friedman, chief executive of City of Hope Medical Center in Los Angeles, points out that many drugs might be efficacious against more than one kind of disease.
One form causes disease in humans, another is swallowed by mosquitoes, still another form reproduces, others move through the insect's intestines, and yet another enters the salivary gland of the mosquito and infects people.
Best of all would be a vaccine, which does not yet exist, at least in part because profit-driven drug firms have little incentive to invent one for a disease that affects mainly poor people.
These kinds of programs have national and international thought leaders in their fields presenting throughout the academic calendar at rounds, meetings, seminars, conferences on every important disease one might encounter as a practicing physician.
Pharmaceutical companies have made a habit of targeting the wrong cause (acetylcholinesterase inhibitors which are basically useless since as the disease progresses acetylcholinesterase activity declines by 85 percent), one aspect of the disease (Namenda as an antagonist for NMDA receptors), or insisting on a partially flawed mechanism for the disease (amyloid plaques).
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Malaria was becoming a distant memory 50 years ago, but the World Health Organization now reports that over 200 million people contract the disease each year and nearly one million people die from the disease each year.
SU-11248 is one of a new spate of cancer pills that work by targeting several of the molecular defects that cause the disease at one time.
Some researchers argue that amyloid is one of many factors in the disease and may not be the primary one for most people.
Yet a class of drugs that represents one of the most important recent advances in treatment of the disease only works for one in three patients.
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Of these, on average, one will have the disease, but 50 others will also test positive.
Heart disease is one of our three biggest killers (along with cancer and stroke).
If this could be proven in patients with cardiovascular disease, one could envision a variety of benefits.
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